T.R. Pearson's Blog, page 3

Aspects of the Novel

My method for writing a novel hasn't changed much through the years. I'll spend weeks on the opening few pages trying to get the narrative voice and the perspective down. I may not have all that much range as a writer, but I do work diligently to put the stories I tell into the mouths of characters built to feel like people, and I find that usually calls for a fair bit of mucking around. There's just no help for it.

Once that's settled, I work straight through and overwrite the novel to a fare thee well. I follow tangents I'll cast aside and pile on narrative detail I know I'll end up cutting. That's simply how I explain the world and the characters to myself. I write too much so that, with luck, I can end up with enough.

I'm pretty adept at believing my overstuffed first drafts have readable novels in them waiting for me to pull them out. Sometimes, though, that's not so easily managed. Imagine plunging your hands into soapy dishwater expecting to find a stock pot and coming up with two plates and a spatula instead. Or a gravy boat. Or a dented bucket. Something entirely other than what you reached in hoping to find.

Far too frequently, that's my experience. I discover the thing I've written isn't quite the thing I meant to write. So either I take another run at the story or I find some way to make a gravy boat work.

But occasionally (if increasingly rarely) I fetch out a stock pot. That's what happened with this new novel, Serpent of Old. That's not to say I guarantee a dazzling reading experience but just that this effort turned out as intended. The characters are who I wanted them to be. The story unspools in the way I meant for it to, and the text and subtext mingle just how I'd hoped they would.

In short, I made this thing -- precisely as it is -- on purpose and not because I had a dented bucket and a deadline. That probably shouldn't be rare, but (for me anyway) it is.

So be warned: I failed to fire wide.

The ebook and paperback are both available:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

Id on Parade

No, not his. Mine.

I plan on releasing a few novels straight from my fevered brain to Amazon, which means I don't have to think about what slot they might fit into or what market they could conceivably serve. Instead, I can simply amuse myself and, with any luck, you as well.

So expect high weirdness for a bit. These will likely be books of no known genre. Nothing dull. Plenty of laughs. Semi-quasi literary. And organized around the sorts of characters I tend to care about more than I probably should.

The first one will see publication in January and is the story of a clash between a band of grimly devout souls and a pair of carelessly worldly guys. The sort of thing ripe for, uh, misunderstanding.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KDCG75T

Ray Again

I've been going round and round with this latest Ray Tatum novel -- tweaking it, rearranging it, rewriting it, setting it aside, picking it up.
Editors are still reading an earlier incarnation, but I have little faith in that route, so I'm releasing a version on Amazon I'm well satisfied with.

In working through the process of setting the novel up for publication, I've learned that Amazon is no longer simply a publisher and retailer of books but also a wholesale distributor of physical books to brick and mortar bookstores. This is new and appears to mean a writer can now publish a paperback through Amazon and have it show up on the shelves of any bookstore in the wide world that cares to order discounted copies.

Now I'm left to wonder how long it will take for Simon&Schuster et al. to sink into the briny deep since Amazon will likely do their work far more efficiently than they've ever done it while paying royalties once a month instead of, you know, never. We'll see.

Anyway, Brigade is up for sale in both ebook and paperback editions, and I'm describing it as Rashomon for the blood and soil crowd -- Ray Tatum among the MAGAs.

https://www.amazon.com/Brigade-TR-Pea...

While I've arrived at a version I like, it has been thorny and difficult to decide what should stay in and what should go out and how exactly to tell a rather tough story. I needed time and distance to make (I hope) the right decisions in the end.

Enjoy, if that's the proper word. Some of these people are kind of awful. Not Ray, though. Never Ray.

(And do feel free to send me corrections here. I'm having to depend on copyediting software and my own eyes, neither of which is completely reliable.)

Yin and . . . more yin

When A Short History of a Small Place was being submitted to publishers thirty-odd years ago, one editor turned it down with the comment "Too many words." Just last week, an editor passed on the latest (and probably last) Ray Tatum book with "Too much dialogue."

So I've gone from too many words to too many spoken words. Doesn't really feel like progress.

Thanks to all of you who've bought copies of my latest, Eaglesworth. The novel is selling well, and I'm grateful for your support. But please do take the time and trouble to review the book on Amazon (and thanks to the dozen or so of you who already have). One line is fine, and say whatever you think. I'm not fishing for praise, just participation.

Editors take these reviews as a sign of interest, and right now my sales are decent, but interest looks low (very low).

I clearly write too many words. I'd be grateful if you'd write a few.

I've Written Something I like. A Lot. Go Figure

I've lately been a typing fool and, as I've mentioned, have finished two novels. One is Ray Tatum-ish and is currently on submission to editors, a painfully slow process. Eaglesworth is the other. My book agent has made it clear she prefers the Ray Tatum novel, but I am far happier with Eaglesworth than anything I've written in a while. Those of you who have knocked around this blog know that's not the sort of claim I normally make about my work, but Eaglesworth is breezy and funny and very close to what I imagined it would be when I started on it.

So I'm just going to put it out and see how it goes. There is both an electronic version and paperback available at Amazon.

Here's the description that will appear along with the book:

A small Virginia town, long since bypassed by the interstate, has but two claims on historical significance — a plaque marking the route where General Longstreet’s army retired from a defeat and a near derelict Georgian mansion called Eaglesworth. The house sits on a hilltop, neglected and weathered, until an outlander rolls in to bring it back to life. The story of the sordid secrets the renovation reveals is told by a pack of local barflies, a ragged bunch of half-cocked civic boosters and gossips who give us history as seen through the bottom of a shot glass.

Funny, bittersweet, and glancingly philosophical, Eaglesworth is a fanciful biography of a place, a latter-day slice of the Old Dominion that the Sage of Monticello would hardly recognize.

I intend to submit this novel in a limited way for print reviews, but your responses will matter most. So if you decide to read this book, please take the time to write an Amazon and/or Goodreads review. Say whatever you like. Praise it or blow it out of the water, entirely up to you, but engagement matters now more than ever.

Since "professional" reviews are increasingly hard to come by and I've no plans to yodel in a Walmart, I need your help. That's the only way I can make a straight-to-Amazon book work, so let me know what you think. Let us all know what you think. And happy reading.

https://www.amazon.com/Eaglesworth-TR...

Old Ray/New Ray

I've piled five Ray Tatum novels into one volume (ebook only) for easy Ray access and at a bargain price. That's Cry Me A River, Blue Ridge, Polar, Warwolf, and First in Flight, all for $7.99 (These novels are still available individually as both ebooks and physical books).

Also, I've recently finished writing two novels, one of them only last week. The first is a Ray Tatum story with a difference in that Ray's is one of several perspectives on the monumental stupidity of white nationalism (yes, it's a comedy), and the second is a novel called Eaglesworth about the lively history of a once-grand Georgian estate on the ratty edge of Jefferson's Virginia. The story is told collectively by the half-lit patrons of a local bar and is kind of a hoot.

So more to come once I've worked out the smart thing to do with these novels -- not that I am at all practiced in smart thingery.

A Little Housekeeping

I've deleted the two chapters I pasted into this blog a few months ago because I've finished the novel they open and can't have bits and bobs of the thing floating through the tubes while it's under consideration.

This new novel is rather more ambitious than what I've been up to lately and is (accidentally) timely, but I can't be sure any of that will work in its favor.

So it'll either be available in 12 months from a publishing house or in a couple of months from me. I'll keep you posted.

This Writing Life

I’ve had questions about the recent TV projects I’ve been working on and have been reluctant to talk about them for various reasons, chiefly because they’ve turned out so poorly. But here goes.

A couple of years ago, my agents in Los Angeles (I have two who work as a team), approached me about pitching a TV show based on the novel Warwolf. I’d never worked in television and knew nothing about the process, but my agents helped me along, and I wrote a pitch for a Ray Tatum drama and ended up selling the idea to a pair of producers who had a deal with 20th Century Fox.

The next step was to try to sell the show to a network, and to that end I wrote a pilot episode, and the producers recruited David Kelley to run and co-write the show. David has a storied history in television — L.A. Law, Doogie Howser, Chicago Hope, Ally McBeal and more recently Goliath, Big Little Lies, and Mr. Mercedes. He rejiggered the script I’d written, and we pitched the show to the heads of the four broadcast networks.

David Kelley is a lovely guy, and pitching a show with him was a great experience, two days of my life I’ll never forget. Everybody was confident we’d sell the show — I think CBS was the prime target — so confident, in fact, that the studio had already written our checks and was simply waiting to hand them to us. But then the show didn’t sell (I’m not at all sure of the reasons), and I was back on the east coast by the time I got the phone call letting the air out of everything.

It was a pretty devastating turn of events, but my nature is to put my head down and keep working, so I decided to come up with another show, and instead of simply a script and a pitch, I wrote eight full episodes of something called Tarnation. It’s half police procedural, half political drama, and it was optioned by a production company and generated lots of cable interest, especially from Lifetime. All of that network’s pertinent executives in L.A. we’re ready to buy the show. They just needed the approval of the network president in New York, who read the episodes over the course of three or four agonizing (for me) days and decided not to pull the trigger. One executive out of maybe a dozen, but he was the one who counted.

I believe Tarnation is still in the process of not working out — actors get attached, directors, etc. — but I don’t even ask anymore.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the tone of the scripts I write is a problem in the TV business just like the tone of my novels is a problem in the publishing business. As most of you already know, I write comedies that emphasize characters over plot. My books are comic. My scripts are comic. Sure there’s drama as well and sometimes carnage, almost always melancholy, but there’s usually humor throughout, and that seems to be the trouble. Not for me. Maybe not for you. But certainly for people who want a drama to look and smell like a drama, by which they often mean plotty melodrama, the sudsier the better.

My books are largely well reviewed but sell poorly, whether I release them or Random House does. And now I’ve been in prime position to sell TV shows twice and have run into something like the same problem there as well. I’m convinced that a show like Tarnation would succeed because it would sound like nothing else on TV, but me being convinced doesn't help.

So my advice to young writers these days is go for the suds. It’s too late for me, and I continue to like what I do and how I do it, so I’ll keep plowing, but I’ll confess that I’m awfully tired of being unlucky. And that’s how I think of it. I’m not a how-can-you-ignore-my-genius sort of guy. I just know I’ve written a lot of stuff. I know the reading public and movie and TV producers buy a lot of stuff, much of it mediocre, which leaves me to wonder why they can’t buy my mediocre stuff too.

Posterity is for suckers. I’ll keep writing. Please keep reading and evangelize when you can. And let’s not talk about my TV career anymore.

Glad News of the Natural World for 99 cents (nevermind -- back to $9.99)

Simon & Schuster still owns the rights to this novel, so I'm just reporting what I've seen -- the ebook of Glad News is currently 99 cents on Amazon. Compare that to the paperback edition, which is (for some reason) $20.95.

A bargain while it lasts. I'll never see a nickel, but this sort of pricing needs to be encouraged.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

Something for your summer reading pile (stack, heap, mound, hillock . . .)

Here's a new novel for you, which comes with the attached copy:

A corrupt police detective enjoying semi-retirement in Tidewater Virginia stumbles onto an unsolved homicide that, given his nature, he’d be happy to leave unsolved. But a few people in his life have other ideas and drag him into an investigation that offers a chance for some small measure of redemption if he’ll only take it. As murder squads go, this crew is no A Team — just an adolescent kid from up the block, a mouthy, conspiratorial-minded paraplegic, and an unhappy housewife our rotten cop met by chance in a Trader Joe’s. What these three lack in savvy and expertise, they more than make up for in blundering determination, so THEORY OF THE CASE becomes the story of one man’s trio of mongrel friends refusing to let him go on being what he’s been.

It's a real book. Lots of Norfolk underbelly, no Ray Tatum. The electronic edition will be a mere .99 cents for the first couple of weeks. But if you insist on a physical book, that'll be $10.99. Paper is dear.

Please do enjoy/review or detest/slag . . . whatever works.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072KF9NGD